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If you Google “dying hard drive sounds,” you can find sound files of hard drives with bad heads, stuck spindles, bad bearings, and other unhealthy conditions. But by the time you hear those kinds of sounds, it’s time for the drive to meet its maker. What can you do before you hear the sound of one drive dying? And how do you nurse it back to health?
Start With The Basics Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the right one. If the drive has worked before, then the problem may be easy to fix—and physical. “I’ve often seen technicians spend hours on an issue that could have been solved in five minutes by checking basic operations,” says Scott King, vice president of operations for The Planet (www.theplanet.com), a hosting company. So check the hard drive to see if it’s seated properly in the drive bay. Make sure that the cables to the motherboard and the power supply are connected firmly and properly. Check the drive controllers, too, and see if they’re seated correctly. If the hard drive is installed the right way and everything is connected correctly, is the hard drive really the problem? This question can be dangerous, because it can take you down the wrong path. But it’s worth considering whether an Internet connection or a problem with an application is what’s causing the trouble. You might have just installed the hard drive in question and know that everything is connected, seated, and settled. If that’s the case, there are a couple of possibilities. One is that the hard drive you’ve chosen may not be compatible with the server. There are many types of hard drives, and not every server is compatible with every hard drive. “Most manufacturers have a list, and most systems let you know that it’s a SATA or ATA drive, but you have to make sure it matches up,” says King. “With some drives, it’s a speed issue. If the server and the hard drive have different spin rates, they may not be compatible at all. Or if the drive is faster, it may just spin at the slower rate, but you may have problems later on.” Fortunately, drive manufacturers almost always post their specs on their Web sites. You should be able to go to the site and input the drive’s model and serial number to verify its compatibility. If that’s all set, try booting from an alternate source such as a bootable USB, CD, or floppy drive. If you’re able to boot from another drive, chances are that the boot partitions of the problematic hard drive are the trouble. There is recovery software available that can fix those (or other) hard drive partitions that have been damaged or corrupted. Settings Check If you’re still having trouble, it might be a matter of adjusting the drive’s settings. Start with the jumper settings, because that’s an easy fix, and it’s one that a lot of techs don’t think of. Each hard drive comes with pins called jumpers that determine whether the server perceives it as a master or a slave. If the drive is set as a slave, rather than a master, then the computer is unlikely to be able to boot from it. This can also be a factor in other situations, explains King. “If the primary drive fails, and you want another drive to become the primary, you have to change that setting,” he says. “Techs often troubleshoot a hard drive problem for an hour before they think to check the jumper settings. New systems don’t require jumper settings, but it’s still out there in older systems.” If the system recognizes the drive but is showing errors, as discussed above, the problem may not be a bad drive but just bad sectors. If that’s the case, it’s a simple matter of running the operating system’s ScanDisk or check disk function. If it finds bad sectors, it will move the data off those sectors to good ones. Be Proactive The best time to start new proactive measures is when you’ve just had their value demonstrated. If you’ve just had to run ScanDisk on one hard drive, why not run it now on other hard drives? Why not set a regular schedule for running it every six months on all your drives? “People often forget to do that regular maintenance and defrag their hard drives,” King says. “That’s how you get drives that are jumping all over the place to get to data and avoid bad sectors. By performing regular maintenance with ScanDisk and defrag, you can identify those bad sectors before they wipe out your data or corrupt your OS.” Be proactive about your backups, too. Don’t just assume they’re running the way you want them to. “Hard drives don’t usually lose data unless something goes really wrong, so being proactive with backups is important,” says Matt Bazan, principal for Fog City IT, an IT outsourcing consultancy in San Francisco. “Monitor your backups regularly to make sure they’re running, because it’s too late once the drive fails.” Tools To Use Most operating systems have all the tools you’ll need to troubleshoot your hard drives. But there are tools that can save you some trouble. For example, Bazan notes that drive imaging software can make it simpler to install a new drive once the old one has gone bad. “It takes a snapshot of the hard drive, and if it fails, you can put a new drive and copy that snapshot to it,” he says. “That can save a lot of time.” Bazan also uses a remote monitoring and management application that receives alerts from hard drives that have software to send signals that something’s wrong. “Hard drives often send warning or error messages to the log system, and those alerts can go to the management system and let you know there’s a problem before something goes really wrong,” he says. Dispose Of Appropriately Even failed hard drives still have data that could be recovered by a determined enough party. Remember that even if you’ve determined that a drive should be replaced, the drive has to be scrubbed, whether by you or a data disposition company. “The disposition of the data that may be on a failed hard drive is a very important consideration,” says Dr. Gavin Manes, president and CEO of Avansic, a digital forensics company. “There have been instances [in which]companies claimed they couldn’t find ”key information, or even intentionally destroyed data, and were heavily fined for their actions. Because of their legal obligations, companies need to coordinate with counsel and make sure that every step of the process is documented for any future issues that may arise in court.” |
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Copyright 2008 Avansic
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